Meet Kraftwerk’s Original 3-D Animator, Rebecca Allen

Kraftwerk wireframe, created by Rebecca Allen and her team in the mid-1980s. Photo: Courtesy Rebecca Allen

Kraftwerk inspect each other. Photo: Courtesy Rebecca Allen

Close-up of Florian's 3-D head. Photo: Courtesy Rebecca Allen

Portrait of Kraftwerk, created for the album cover of Techno Pop, released in 1986. Photo: Courtesy Rebecca Allen

Allen kisses the head of former Kraftwerk drummer Karl Bartos. Photo: Linda Law

Photo taken during the setup to digitize the heads of Kraftwerk. Photo: Linda Law

Photo taken during the setup to digitize Kraftwerk's heads in the mid-1980s. Photo: Linda Law

Image taken during the test graphics created for Techno Pop, released in 1986. Photo: Courtesy Rebecca Allen

Rebecca Allen in the mid-1980s. Photo: Linda Law

When Kraftwerk needed a video to match its electronic music nearly three decades ago, the band turned to Rebecca Allen, a pioneer in the field of computer art. Allen was the creative genius at the helm for 1986’s “Musique Non Stop,” one of the earliest examples of rendered 3-D graphics in a music video.

Creating the milestone video, which made Allen a major force behind the German band’s visual aesthetic in the ’80s, was a painstaking process that took nearly two years for Allen and her team at the New York Institute of Technology’s Computer Graphics Laboratory to complete.

“Nowadays you can pretty easily digitize a 3-D object,” said Allen in an interview with Wired. “Back then, it was a very crafted process. I would have to put little pieces of tape over the models…. Then you put it in this reference cube, and then point by point you’d digitize.”

In the abstract video, animated heads flash across the screen. It took hundreds of hours just to get the colors exactly the way Allen wanted them. (See behind-the-scenes photographs of the creative process in the exclusive gallery above.)

“There’s so much involved — not just the color, but then you had to get the lighting … and it’s on some crummy TV, ultimately,” said Allen, now a design professor at UCLA. “But that’s the way I am. If you’re an animator, it’s already clear that you’re a fanatic — an obsessive. Anybody who wants to make frames for every second of movement is obviously pretty obsessive about things.”

The attention to detail paid off: The “Musique Non Stop” music video still looks prescient, even today. In Kraftwerk’s recent eight-day stand at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the band made ample use of visuals gleaned from the video. Other pioneering music videos with rendered 3-D graphics sequences — such as Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing,” which won Video of the Year at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards — look dated in comparison.

Crafting the Look of ‘Musique Non Stop’

Part of the enduring genius of “Musique Non Stop,” which you can view above, was that it didn’t look too slick, even at the time.

“If you look at that video, everything is very deliberate — I had a lot of time to think about it,” Allen said. “It looks a bit rough and sketchy in a way, but that’s what I wanted; I didn’t want a slick computer graphics look…. When you move things on a frame buffer on the computer screen, it shows the red, green and blue colors sort of separately, and I played with that too…. This is digital art, and this is what it looks like when you work.”

Her exacting approach meshed well with Kraftwerk’s. “They are, to say the least, pretty meticulous and fussy about every little note,” Allen said. “As I was getting the color and shading and lighting just perfect, they were trying to get the perfect sounds.”

Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, who co-founded the band in 1970, were also very particular about their look, which connected with their music. (German artist Emil Schult, who was responsible for Kraftwerk’s album covers and visual identity beginning in the 1970s, also wrote some of the band’s lyrics. In a way, he was almost like a secret member of the group.)

The video’s spare, minimal wireframes of the band members — and the close-ups of their jagged, polygonal faces — were a big part of the video’s aesthetic.

“I really wanted to have a digital look, to exploit the wireframe,” Allen said. “And to exploit the faceted polygonal model, which I would call cubistic. When you’re building a computer model, you’re building it out of polygons and putting it together; then you shade them to make it look more smooth. But I really wanted to play with that look.”

To create the band members’ bodies, Allen and her team used 3-D models they had on hand from working on a project for the NFL.

“We took these football players and slimmed them down and gave them pointy shoes and put [Kraftwerk’s] heads on it,” Allen said. “Because Kraftwerk is so minimal in their movements, and so robotic in how they perform, that was a lifesaver — I could do minimal robotic movement instead of trying to do fluid robotic movement. But with the face, I wanted the eyes to be realistic. So I used a texture map, a photograph of a real eye.”

Allen also designed the cover art for Kraftwerk’s 1986 album Techno Pop (also known as Electric Café). During the press blitz for the record, Kraftwerk turned down interviews, providing 3-D graphics created by Allen instead of normal publicity photos.

“The press hated that,” she said.

The computer artist is also the source of the female vocals in “Musique Non Stop” — one of the only times a woman’s voice appears in Kraftwerk’s entire oeuvre. “The voice that says ‘Musique nonstop, techno pop’ was my voice,” Allen said. “Florian, who worked with the voices in Kraftwerk, said, … ‘You’re making our digital image, but we are using your voice.’ Florian didn’t say exactly what he did; I don’t know how much it was manipulated or built, or what the process was.”

How Rebecca Allen Joined Forces With Kraftwerk

Computer graphics were a longstanding interest of Allen’s, who made her first computer animation with punch cards in 1974 as a student at Rhode Island School of Design. There, she shared a house with David Byrne, one of her classmates. Later, as a grad student at MIT’s Architecture Machine Group, she assisted with cover art for the classic Talking Heads album Remain in Light.

Allen befriended Kraftwerk in 1984 after moving to New York Institute of Technology. By that time, she had contributed to several early music videos, and to Twyla Tharp’s video dance piece The Catherine Wheel. Kraftwerk’s members had seen one of her videos, and they knew about NYIT’s Computer Graphics Laboratory.

“They were really into computers and they loved this lab,” Allen said. “So Florian got in touch with me. We decided I would go to Europe and get to know them and see their work and talk and brainstorm. But Florian and Ralf were going to be in Paris on a bicycle race or something, so I met them in Paris.”

“Florian and Ralf were just a barrel of laughs.”

She spent some time in the French capital with Kraftwerk before continuing to Germany, where they drove down the autobahn to Düsseldorf. “Florian and Ralf were just a barrel of laughs,” she said.

A further testament to Allen’s connection to the band: She is also one of the only people, besides band members, to have set foot in Kraftwerk’s mythic Kling Klang Studio.

“I remember Florian telling me, ‘You’re very lucky to be here; we don’t let anybody in here,'” she said. “‘Michael Jackson came and we didn’t let him in. Nobody is allowed, and you are allowed in.'” According to legend, not even Hütter and Schneider’s girlfriends were allowed into Kling Klang.

Allen’s longstanding love of Kraftwerk continues today. During the recent MoMA retrospective — in which Hütter, the group’s sole remaining original member, led Kraftwerk through a series of eight concerts — Allen fixed her gaze on the massive screen behind the band during “Musique Non Stop.”

The original visuals from the video flashed onscreen, mixed up with new ones. For a few fleeting moments, Rebecca Allen’s video was the biggest canvas at MoMA.